Europe in Its Own Eyes, Europe in the Eyes of the Other

4. Retrospective, Myth, and the Colonial Question: Twentieth-Century Europe as the Other in World History

81 Chapter 4 Retrospective, Myth, and the Colonial Question: Twentieth-Century Europe as the Other in World History David B. MacDonald As the twentieth century drew to a close, retrospectives entered into fashion , be they boxed set or abridged, chronological descriptions, or fin de siècle memoirs.1 Written by some of the period’s leading historians and political scientists, these attempted, by and large, to portray the twentieth century as the most atrocious in human history in terms of totalizing ideologies , bloodshed, terror, and mass death. While providing useful coverage of twentieth-century events, retrospectives had a tendency to downplay or ignore conflict and conquest in earlier centuries. The nineteenth century emerged as an age of moral values, hope, progress, and enlightenment—an era squandered only from the First World War onward, leading inexorably to Auschwitz, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Yugoslavia. In this chapter I seek to explore how and why the twentieth century has been cast as the most atrocious. I also problematize the creation of a nineteenth -century foil, a moral opposite and other that has often been used to create a false before-and-after portrayal of historical events. Historian Will Durant calculated that there has been a period of only twenty-nine years in all of human history during which no warfare was in progress somewhere in the world (Hynes 1998, xi). Yet a form of historical amnesia seems to pervade Western scholarship, whereby the twentieth century emerges as decisive break from the past, an anomaly—or “very unpleasant surprise” (Glover 1999, 3). Previous centuries, however, were hardly ideal—either for Europeans or their colonial subjects. Colonialism in earlier centuries saw large percentages of Indigenous peoples killed—there were more examples of successfully implemented genocide in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Chapter 4 82 than afterward. Without downplaying the reality of twentieth-century horrors (or their death totals), there needs to be space for resurrecting the past. This chapter will critically examine twentieth-century retrospectives, contrasting them with recent critiques of colonialism in the nineteenth century and before. I critique fin de siècle Eurocentric scholarship for deliberately ignoring many of the negative aspects of Western history, even reconstructing time in such a way as to privilege European history and events over those of other continents and peoples. This underlines the trend, as Chakrabarty has noted, of putting “Europe first, the rest of the world later” (2000). Approaching History: Conflicting Perspectives How history is approached is often as important as the events themselves. Hayden White has critiqued the idea that histories or retrospectives are authentic representations of actual events, with only “certain rhetorical flourishes or poetic effects” to distract readers from the truth of what they are reading (1987, x, 24). Rather, White argues that all forms of historical narrative, be they “annals,” “chronicles,” or “history proper” (according to his taxonomy), are subject to a process of “narrativising.” Here historians try to create a story from the “real events” of history, complete with a beginning and an end, and some type of moral lesson. As White argues, the biases, desires, and fantasies of the historian cannot be considered separate from the events they are describing. Which events are chosen and how they are presented will depend on a number of very personal factors, expressed through the “narrativising” process (White 1987, 4). This argument about “narrativising” was later raised by Campbell, in his alternative reading of the first Gulf War. He describes how policy-makers, historians, and others interpret events and craft a “story” with an “ordered plot,” “cast of characters,” “attributable motivations,” and “lessons for the future” (Campbell 1993, 7, 26–27). Historical accounts are often little more than one interpretation and organization of a myriad of events, arranged according to the bias and ideals of the “narrator.” White and Campbell both laudably attempt to examine the method by which a series of chronological events eventually emerge as a closed historical juncture, with a beginning and an end and a series of moral lessons of good and evil. Through such a reading, retrospectives on the twentieth century involve a set of judgments , normative redefinitions of the past, and prescriptions for the future. We learn lessons from them: “Don’t follow charismatic leaders”; “Beware of totalizing ideologies”; “Democracy is the best defence against violence and bloodshed”; and so on. Retrospectives tell us where we went wrong and Retrospective, Myth, and the Colonial Question David B...